Perception, of course, does not only involve
that-which-is-given. We participate in it. We add to it.

The great American psychologist George Kelly
had a philosophy he called constructive
alternativism. Constructive alternativism is the idea that, while
there
is only one true reality, reality is always experienced from one or
another
perspective, or alternative construction. I have a
construction,
you have one, a person on the other side of the planet has one, someone
living long ago had one, a primitive person has one, a modern scientist
has one, every child has one, even someone who is seriously mentally
ill
has one.

Some constructions are better than others. Mine, I hope, is better
than
that of someone who is seriously mentally ill. My physician's
construction
of my ills is better, I trust, than the construction of the local faith
healer. Yet no-one's construction is ever complete - the world is just
too complicated, too big, for anyone to have the perfect perspective.
And
no-one's perspective is ever to be completely ignored. Each perspective
is, in fact, a perspective on the ultimate reality, and has some value
to that person in that time and place.

In fact, Kelly says, there are an infinite number of alternative
constructions
one may take towards the world, and if ours is not doing a very good
job,
we can take another!

Take a look at this photograph:

You probably see a young girl playing chess. If you are
familiar with the game, you will know the names of the various pieces,
such as knights (not horses) and rooks (not castles). You may
"see" the potential moves of the pieces - which others would not
notice. You might note that she must be playing black, so that
the piece in her hand has been captured (a knight - not a bad
catch!). You may notice what a novice might not: She has
castled (a move involving both king and rook). I, as a chess
player, notice that she could probably beat the pants off of me!

If a baby were looking at the chess set, he or she might respond by
attempting to eat the pieces. A young child may see the pieces as
little people. A chess master may see
weaknesses in her position, or traps she may develop. It all
depends on who is doing the looking! Perception, although it
begins "out there," quickly involves the person, his or her mind, his
or her knowledge, based on his or her previous experiences, and so
on. Nothing in psychology is ever as simple as it seems!

Kelly began his theorizing with
what he called his
"fruitful
metaphor."
He had noticed long before that scientists and therapists often
displayed
a peculiar attitude towards people: While they thought quite well of
themselves,
they tended to look down on their subjects or clients. While they saw
themselves
as engaged in the fine arts of reason and empiricism, they tended to
see
ordinary people as the victims of their sexual energies or conditioning
histories. But Kelly, with his experience teaching Kansas college
students and counseling Kansas farm
people, noted that these ordinary people, too, were engaged in science,
and they, too, were trying to understand what was going on.

So people - ordinary people - are scientists, too. They have
their constructions
of reality, like scientists have theories. They have
anticipations
or expectations, like scientists have hypotheses. They engage in
behaviors
that test those expectations, like scientists do experiments. They
improve
their understandings of reality on the bases of their experiences, like
scientists adjust their theories to fit the facts. From this metaphor
comes
Kelly's entire theory.

Anticipation

Here is a highly simplified model of the interaction between
ourselves and the world around us. At its simplest, the world
gives
us events; we in turn give those events meaning by interpreting and
acting
upon them.There are some obvious details
here: sensations (input from
the
world, stimuli) and actions (output to the world, responses).
There
was a time when psychologists thought this was enough. Now we
know
better, and we add two more details, which I will call anticipation and
adaptation.

Anticipation is a little difficult to explain. We have a
certain
knowledge of the world, a "model" of it. This model includes
everything
from little details like which shoe you put on first to complex things
like how you feel about yourself and your life. We use this model
to anticipate - expect, predict - what will happen in the next moment
or in the next ten years.

If I close my eyes, I expect that when I open them the room will
still be there, I will still be there, and so
on.
If it were to all disappear on me, I would be seriously
surprised.

If I keep my eyes closed and focus on the expectation, rather than
on
the world "out there," I can imagine it. We can
understand
images and thoughts as anticipations temporarily detached from the
stream
of events!

We also anticipate on a more long term basis: We have
expectations
about what college will and won't do for us, about love being forever,
and the sun rising, and so on.

Anticipation is particularly significant in understanding language:
from moment to moment, we anticipate which sounds are likely to come
next, which grammatical constructions, which meaningful combinations...
We can make
sense even of a fuzzy, somewhat jumbled conversation.

Anticipation also helps us to understand how we manage to pay
attention
to some things and not others. How is it we can be listening to a
friend in
a noisy bar and manage to somehow "filter out" all the other
conversations and yet "let in" our friend's voice? We don’t perceive everything
that
stimulates our senses. How do we 'filter out" the unimportant (less
meaningful)
stuff? We don't: We just don’t select it! We select things by means of
anticipation.
We hear the conversation that we are busily involved in, the one we are
anticipating
moment to moment. The rest is just noise. Likewise with the other
senses:
We see what we are looking for, we don’t see what we are not
looking
for.

Adaptation is also more difficult to explain. Sometimes, we
don't
anticipate well. For example, you think you see a friend coming
at
you and you prepare to give a hearty "hi!" but just as you raise your
arm
to wave and begin to open your mouth, you realize it's not your friend
at all but a complete stranger. (If possible, you convert the
raised
arm into a back-scratch, and the open mouth into a yawn. If it's
too late and you've already said hi, just pretend you know them.
This will drive them crazy.)

Whenever you make mistakes, you need to figure out what went wrong,
what to do about it, how to make sense of it. As you do, you are
improving your understanding of the world and your relation to it; you
are improving your "model." This is adaptation. In our
example,
you may now have a model of the world that includes look-alikes,
embarrassing
mistakes, and a tendency to hold-off a little in the future before
being
so exuberant with your hello's. Adaptation is learning.

This additional layer to interaction of anticipation and adaptation
is crucial: It means that our behaviors and experiences are
not just a function of some common reality. We, ourselves, our
understandings
of reality, are inevitably and intrinsically a part of our behaviors
and
experiences. Without "self," reality would be meaningless.

Kelly organized his theory
into a fundamental postulate and 11
corollaries. His fundamental postulate says this: "A person's
processes
are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates
events."
(This and all subsequent quotations are from Kelly's 1955 The
Psychology
of Personal Constructs. ) This is the central movement in the
scientific
process: from hypothesis to experiment or observation, i.e. from
anticipation
to experience and behavior.

By processes, Kelly means your experiences, thoughts, feelings,
behaviors,
and whatever might be left over. All these things are determined, not
just
by the reality out there, but by your efforts to anticipate the
world, other people, and yourself, from moment to moment as well as
day-to-day
and year-to-year.

So, when I look out of my window to find the source of some
high-pitched
noises, I don't just see exactly and completely what is out there. I
see
that which is in keeping with my expectations. I am ready for birds,
perhaps,
or children laughing and playing. I am not prepared for a bulldozer
that
operates with a squeal rather than the usual rumbling, or for a flying
saucer landing in my yard. If a UFO were in fact the source of the
high-pitched
noises, I would not truly perceive it at first. I'd perceive something.
I'd be confused and frightened. I'd try to figure out what I'm looking
at. I'd engage in all sorts of behaviors to help me figure it out, or
to
get me away from the source of my anxiety! Only after a bit would I be
able to find the right anticipation, the right hypothesis: "Oh my God,
it's a UFO!"

If, of course, UFO's were a common place occurrence in my world,
upon
hearing high-pitched noises I would anticipate birds, kids, or a UFO,
an
anticipation that could then be quickly refined with a glance out of
the
window.

That is, we construct our anticipations using our past
experience.
We are fundamentally conservative creatures; we expect things to happen
as they've happened before. We look for the patterns, the
consistencies,
in our experiences. If I set my alarm clock, I expect it to ring at the
right time, as it has done since time immemorial. If I behave nicely to
someone, I expect them to behave nicely back.

This is the step from theory to hypothesis, i.e. from construction
system (knowledge, understanding) to anticipation.

The experience corollary: "A person's construction system
varies as he successively construes
the replication of events."

When things don't happen the way they have in the past, we have to
adapt,
to reconstruct. This new experience alters our future
anticipations.
We learn.

This is the step from experiment and observation to validation or
reconstruction:
Based on the results of our experiment -- the behaviors we engage in --
or our observation -- the experiences we have -- we either continue our
faith in our theory of reality, or we change the theory.

A graphic version:

Images and ideas

If I close my eyes, I expect that when I open them you will still be
there,
the room will still be there, I will still be there, and so on. If all
you
of you were to disappear on me I would be seriously surprised. We
also
anticipate on a more long term basis: We have expectations about what
college
will and won't do for us, about love being forever, and the sun rising,
and
so on.

If I keep my eyes closed and focus on the expectation, rather than
on you
and the world "out there," I can imagine you. We can understand
images
and thoughts as anticipations temporarily detached from the stream of
events! The father of cognitive psychology, Ulric Neisser,
said
that
"Images are not pictures in the head, but plans for obtaining
information
from potential environments.... When you have an image of a
unicorn
at your elbow - while quite certain that unicorns are purely mythical
animals - you are making ready to pick up the visual information that
the
unicorn
would provide, despite being fully aware that your preparations are in
vain."
(Neisser pp. 131-132)

A mental image is a blend of anticipation and a kind of
scanning for the information that makes images more a matter of
"drawing" the image than passively receiving it. Researchers are
even talking about us having a "visuo-spatial sketchpad", probably in
the frontal lobe! The same thing
with imagining a song: I feel the muscles in my throat loosening
and tightening as if I were singing or humming the tune. I am not
suggesting that the image is reducible to motor movements.
Rather, the presence of motor movements suggests that images are
anticipatory.

It follows that images are more a matter of unrealized looking than
internalized seeing. When we imagine the unicorn, we "draw" the horse's
head with a goat’s beard and single horn with our anticipations. In the
same way, we listen for the song, rather than hear it "in our heads",
or explore with restrained movement an imaginary surface rather than
experience faint sensations of touch.

However, people also experience some rather striking mental
images. Some things do seem to pop into my awareness with amazing
clarity. And, at the opposite extreme, we quite often anticipate
in a more "generic" fashion, as when we anticipate a human being - any
human being - and not some specific one. That is to say,
sometimes we anticipate with an idea more than with an image. The
sudden complete image and the generic idea require a somewhat richer
conception of anticipation.

Imagine that the signals coming from our sensory neurons are met by
neurons that have been "primed" by our anticipation of those
sensations. That is, based
on the events of the prior moments of interaction between the neural
structures that are the result of our lifetime of learning, neurons or
neural nets are activated, and when the sensory circumstances that they
predict are confirmed by incoming sensory signals, these neurons or
neural nets pass that information deeper into (let us assume)
association cortex, where they lead to the next set of
anticipations. If the anticipations are not confirmed by incoming
sensory information (say within a certain time span), signals
indicating that non-confirmation are sent on to trigger new
anticipations that attempt to correct the mistaken anticipations (along
with actions and emotional experiences as well, one presumes). This
latter effect could be considered the basis of learning.

Now imagine a situation where we detach ourselves from incoming sensory
information: We are asleep and dreaming, perhaps, or have closed
our eyes or are staring at a blank page. We can nevertheless
generate anticipations, and set neurons or neural nets into that
anticipatory mode. But, instead of having them send signals only
when confirmed by sensory information, our new state allows these
anticipatory neurons to pass on their signals deeper into association
cortex without confirmation. They may even have further
repercussions by triggering new anticipations, actions, emotions, and
even learning.

In the usual perceptual interaction with the world, all the neurons
that a primed to receive incoming information from the senses at a
particular time could be considered our total anticipation for that
moment. In the restricted mode, retracted from interaction with
the senses, all the primed neurons would be an image or an idea.

Now consider the difference between images and ideas: Images may
be understood as the activity of anticipatory neurons nearer the
sensory end of our mental structure. A strong image is the
anticipation of a highly specific set of sensations.

Given a "white" sensory field (white light or white noise, for
examples), strong image anticipation will select from that field the
expected qualities, giving us a visual or auditory experience that, in
circumstances of
minimal or unusual information, could be mistaken for an actual
event. Perhaps you have had the experience of thinking that
someone called your name while you were in the shower. The "white
noise' of the water provides a blank slate for you to project your
expectations. The complete or near-complete absence of sensory
input of sleep
also gives a kind of empty surface to "project" image anticipations
onto. In the absence of actual sensory information to compare it
to, the image will be perceived as more-or-less vivid.

Ideas, on the other hand, reflect the activity of anticipatory neurons
deeper in the mind's structure which are the main ingredients of
imageless thought. The idea of "horse" may manifest itself at any
moment in the image of some particular horse, but need not.
Ideas should not, therefore, be confused with "fuzzy"
perceptions. Ideas are the "purer" meanings of our anticipations,
experienced at a greater distance from sensation.

Thinking

Thinking, says Ulric Neisser, is also a
matter
of imagery:
"The
ability to divide, detach, and manipulate our own anticipations is
immensely important. It is, I believe, the fundamental operation in all
so-called higher mental processes." (Neisser, p. 133) He goes even
further by suggesting that perception, imagery, learning, memory,
behavior... are all of a piece, which he refers to as cognition:
"Cognition is the activity of knowing; the acquisition, organization,
and use of knowledge." (Neisser, p. 1)

Many teachers make an attempt at teaching their students to think,
but
eventually conclude that only a small portion of them have any
potential
for it. After looking carefully - phenomenologically - at the
act
of thinking, I have come to believe that their despair is rooted in a
misconception:
They see thinking as something that happens only in our
heads.
It is this limitation that in turn limits their view of their students'
potentials.

But let's start with that traditional, internal kind of
thinking.
Take a look at your own thought processes: What do you
find?
Muffled words in your own voice, perhaps accompanied by throat and
tongue
movements? Pale images, cartoon-like, seen only a portion at a
time
and then fleetingly? Unexpressed actions and unfulfilled
perceptions?
It doesn't seem like much to work with, does it?

The words and images are "pale" because we are not looking at the
sights
and sounds themselves but at our readiness for them. When
we are ready for a sight or sound or act, that readiness becomes the
background
that reveals the absent figure. We are set, prepared physically
and
mentally, for a certain word or image and, though it doesn't arrive, it
feels as if it did.

The most robust aspect of thought, oddly, is affect.
Feelings
mark our presence, our involvement, in our own experiences. They
are there in our thoughts as well. It is these feelings that we
usually
refer to as the meaning of an experience: If we imagine a
blue sky, we don't so much see a blue sky in our minds as "see" the
feelings
we have on a crisp autumn day or at a midsummer picnic - what a blue
sky
means to us.

Some might object and mention that their images are quite intense
and
detailed, and I would have to acknowledge that readiness and feelings
can
be extraordinary. But only when we cannot or will not compare our
thoughts with fuller experiences do we mistake them for fuller
experiences.
Otherwise, thinking -- at least the kind that goes on in our heads -
seems
a rather introverted, inhibited, incomplete thing.

Incomplete though it may be, thinking is something most of us
teachers
are quite good at. As kids, we could "do things" in our heads,
silently,
remaining seated and disturbing no one. This quality endeared us
to our teachers. They valued it, so we valued it. Now that
we are teachers ourselves, we value it in our students. When we
don't
find it, we are disappointed and complain about motivation or
intelligence
or prior teachers.

But thinking doesn't have to be silent and still.
Readiness and feelings are part of all our experiences. So, in a
sense, thought is a part of all our experiences. It's a little
harder
to see it when it's blended into perceptions and behaviors, but I
suggest
it is much more powerful this way.

For example, most people, even ones who aren't good at silent
thinking,
can and do talk. In fact - isn't it amazing? - when I talk, I
don't
usually put the words together carefully, grammatically, beforehand in
my mind. They come out of my mouth already so arranged!
Speech
is not preceded by thought; speech is thinking outloud.

And others can hear me when I talk. Instead of having to take
both sides of an argument myself, I can engage someone else to take a
side.
We can have a dialog, a conversation. Conversations are
much
more entertaining - and have much more creative potential - than any
solitary cogitation.

The same thing with images: We can draw, diagram, graph,
paint,
sculpt, and otherwise turn our "readinesses" into realities. They
are clearer then; they hold still longer and can be pondered; we can
interact
with them. We can show them to others.

We can also turn our images into actions. As human
beings,
it's no surprise that most of our images are human ones. And, as
human beings, we are equipped to demonstrate these images with our own
bodies. In elementary and secondary school, we're always trying
to
keep children from "acting out" their problems; perhaps we should encourage
it. Perhaps they're just thinking!

And we can let go of some of those unexpressed actions mentioned
earlier.
There's a great advantage to doing that: The world responds to
our
actions as it will, not as we want it to. In other words, the
world,
too, can be engaged in a dialog, with all the potential for creativity
inherent in any conversation.

The feelings, of course, will still be there, at least if these
perceptions
and behaviors and dialogs have any meaning. Beware: If
there
are no feelings - positive or negative - there is very little
thinking
of any sort!

When my parents taught us kids how to play a card game, we always
played
the first few hands with our cards face up on the table. We do
this
when we teach people how to think, too. But with thinking, it
doesn't
really matter if you ever learn to keep your cards to yourself.
Real
thinking can and does occur in our interaction with the world and
others.
So let's drop this notion of thinking as something inside our
heads.
Perhaps there really isn't that much going on in there.

Person
perception

Philosophers
sometimes talk
about the "problem of the other:" How is it that we know that another
person
is in fact another person, like us, conscious, capable of thought and
feeling?
Do we notice that there are similarities to how we ourselves behave,
and
somehow reason our way to that conclusion? Or is it that we just see
their person-hood? I believe the latter.

Franz From
had people look at a
variety
of
movies and describe what they saw. He discovered that "When we have to
describe
a behavior sequence, we generally do so by indicating a perception of
some
psychological state in the behaving person." (From, p. 7)
"...(W)hen we perceive human behavior as action...implicit in the
percieved material sequence there is a certain sens. By this, I
mean that we
are perceiving the behavior as being governed by a mental factor."
(From, p. 69) This mental factor is also called intention,
purpose, or
meaning.

We can see sens in the
behavior of animals, even insects: I can't
tell
you how impressed I've been with praying mantises and garden spiders.
They
really look at you, follow your movements, respond with great care...
even
though their brains are as small as a grain of rice!

This even applies to things that aren't really alive at all - i.e.
we
can be quite mistaken about sens!
Fritz Heider and Marianne
Simmel did an experiment
involving
a film of triangles moving about in "purposeful" ways: People saw the
triangles
as having intentions! Rubin refered to other people, animals, and even
apparently
purposeful triangle as psychoid entities.

When we observe people, the absence of meaning is actually
the special
case! From tells this story:

One afternoon when Professor Rubin and I
had already put on our
overcoats, ready to go home from the laboratory, Rubin said: 'See here,
From.' At the
same moment he sat down at is desk and looked straight ahead while he
made
short abrupt horizontal movements right and left in the air in front of
him
with his right hand, keeping the index finger and the thumb closely
together.
I just managed to think something like 'What on earth has happened to
Rubin,'
when he got hold of a pencil and a piece of paper, drew a system of
small
arrows and pushed the paper across to me, saying: 'Here is the code to
the
safety lock on my bicycle. Would you mind riding the bike home for me?'
The
earlier perception of something completely incomprehensible was
immediately
replaced, and the purpose of his behavior, i.e., to note down the code
which
he 'had in his fingers,' became quite apparent.... (From, p. 13)

Often we treat people exactly as we treat other
events:
abusing them, ignoring them, taking them for granted.... You've
all
felt it, I'm sure: being treated like a thing instead of a
person.
But more often, I like to believe, we treat people as something
more:
We treat them as meaning-giving creatures like ourselves, as
people.
This is the basis of social interaction.

An odd addendum: Since
we give the world meaning, we can give it social meaning when it suits
us. This means we wind up engaging in social interaction in the
absence
of other people! We obey traffic signals (some of us) on empty
streets
in the middle of the night; we laugh or cry with characters in books or
figures on a screen; we respond to the works of artists hundreds, even
thousands of years dead.... In other words, social interaction
includes
behavior and experience in the implied or symbolic presence of others,
as well as in their actual presence.

Social
interaction

George Kelly uses four of his corollaries to elaborate:

First, there's the individuality
corollary:
"Persons differ from each other
in their construction of events." Since everyone has different
experiences, everyone's construction of
reality is different. One reality, many perspectives. If
you have read any of the preceding chapters, you are way ahead.
But if we are all so very unique, how can we relate to others?

That where the commonality
corollary comes in:
"To the extent that one person
employs a construction of experience
which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological
processes
are similar to the other person." Just because we are all
different doesn't mean we can't be similar.
If our construction system - our understanding of reality - is
similar,
so will be our experiences, our behaviors, and our feelings. For
example,
if we share the same culture, we'll see things in a similar way, and
the
closer we are, the more similar we'll be.

In fact, Kelly says that we spend a great deal of our time seeking
validation
from other people. A man sitting himself down at the local bar and
sighing
"women!" does so with the expectation that his neighbor at the bar will
respond with the support of his world view he is at that moment
desperately
in need of: "Yeah, women! You can't live with 'em and you can't live
without
'em." The same scenario, with minor modifications, can be found among
women.
And similar scenarios apply as well to kindergarten children,
adolescent
gangs, the klan, political parties, scientific conferences, and so on.
We look for support from those who are similar to ourselves. Only they
can know how we truly feel!

Then the fragmentation corollary
says "A person may successively employ
a variety of construction
subsystems
which are inferentially incompatible with each other." It says
that we can be inconsistent
within ourselves. It is, in fact, a rare person who "has it all
together"
and functions, at all times in all places, as a unified personality.
Nearly
all of us, for example, have different roles that we play in life: I am
a man, a husband, a father, a son, a professor; I am someone with
certain
ethnic, religious, political, and philosophical identifications;
sometimes
I'm a patient, or a guest, or a host, or a customer. And I am not quite
the same in these various roles.

Often the roles are separated by circumstances. A man might be a cop
at night, and act tough, authoritarian, efficient. But in the daytime,
he might be a father, and act gentle, tender, affectionate. Since the
circumstances
are kept apart, the roles don't come into conflict. But heaven forbid
the
man finds himself in the situation of having to arrest his own child!
Or
a parent may be seen treating a child like an adult one minute,
scolding
her the next, and hugging her like a baby the following minute. An
observer
might frown at the inconsistency. Yet, for most people, these
inconsistencies
are integrated at higher levels: The parent may be in each case
expressing
his or her love and concern for the child's well-being.

Some of Kelly's followers have reintroduced an old idea to the study
of personality, that each of us is a community
of selves,
rather
than just one simple self. This may be true. However, other theorists
would
suggest that a more unified personality might be healthier, and a
"community
of selves" is a little too close to multiple personalities for comfort!

Finally, how do we interact with people with whom we have very
little in common? This is addressed by the sociality corollary:
"To the extent that one person
construes the construction processes
of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other
person." Even if you are not really similar to another person,
you can still
relate to them. You can, in fact, construe how another construes
- "get inside his head," and
"know
what she means." In other words, I can set aside a portion of myself
(made
possible through the fragmentation corollary) to "be" someone else.

Think about what this means: I have to operate not only in my
own "meaning system," but in yours as well, and you have to operate in
mine. In order to deal with you, I have to know a little about
your
mind as well as my own, and you have to know a little about mine.
We recognize this every time we talk about "psyching each other out" or
when we say "I see where you're coming from!"

The phenomenal field

George Kelly based much of his thinking on the work of two American
psychologists named Donald Snygg
and Arthur
Combs, who said that "all behavior,
without exception, is completely determined by
and pertinent to the phenomenal field of the behaving
organism."
The phenomenal field is our subjective reality, the world we are aware
of, including physical objects and people, and our behaviors,
thoughts,
images, fantasies, feelings, and ideas like justice, freedom, equality,
and so on. It is, if you like, the inside of that big arrow
between World and Self in the diagram at the start of this
chapter. Snygg and Combs emphasize, above all
else, that it is
this phenomenal field that is the true subject-matter for psychology.

And so, if we wish to understand and predict people's behavior, we
need
to get at their phenomenal field. Since we can't observe it
directly,
we need to infer it from the things we can observe. We can record
behavior, give various tests, talk to the person, and so on - Snygg
and
Combs are open to a variety of methods. If we have a variety
of observers as well, we will eventually come to understand the
person's
phenomenal field.

And then you are set to understand and predict the person's
behavior,
since, as the quote above says, all their behavior will follow as a
reasonable,
meaningful, purposeful response to the person's phenomenal field.